I've now turned my attention to preparation for beta1. Already talk has resumed on the mailing list of a tentative schedule; there still remains too much to do to expect it before the new year, but with the list of blockers now reduced effectively to two (one relating to installing source packages on the actual release image, which I intend to look into solving soon; the other is about clashing mime supertype declaration and may prove trickier to solve), the actual "release branch" is hopefully not more than a month away.

I've already begun drafting release notes and making build system cleanups as part of preparation. There is finally light at the end of the tunnel - don't give up hope yet. :)

I'm just putting it out there that if all goes according to plan, I'll be spending lots of time in a nice Haiku virtual machine over the coming weeks to get a really good look at the state of the continuation of the best operating system ever made.

There's copyright issues with cloning Windows and UNIX, but Wine/ReactOS and Linux/BSD have managed it fine. I fail to see how copyright stops people from cloning a closed source OS, especially since there was legal court case a few years ago establishing that compatible reimplementations of closed source API's is legal. (i've looked, can't find it, but i know it exists), so there is nothing stopping someone from making a compatible OS which runs software for whatever system you wish to target

I think that BeOS captured the enthusiasm of many, much more so than OS/2 for which there are (were?) two replication projects: OSFree and Voyager. BeOS also introduced a number of concepts, many of which have yet to be copied/implemented by current commercial operating systems. It is also relatively legacy-free yet provides POSIX support.

The absence of a Classic Mac OS replication project is somewhat puzzling.

Classic MacOS was crap. There's no point in running it on modern commodity hardware, or even any PPC Mac new enough to run OS X 10.4. Arca Noae (formerly eCom) is planning on replacing OS/2 with binary-compatible Free Software one piece at a time as a way to work around the licensing thicket.

Though classic MacOS ~recreation could avoid some architectural pitfalls of it while taking advantage of modern hardware, and providing the same GUI and app compatibility. Kinda like (but not quite...) FreeDOS or DOSbox do for DOS, or Amitlhon or AROS do for AmigaOS.